Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare or was it someone else with a better education and broader life experience? For more than 150 years scholars have puzzled over how a relatively uneducated boy from the inconsequential English town of Stratford-upon-Avon could have produced the greatest plays and poems the world has ever seen.

He was a genius, say some, but that doesn’t resolve anything. One may be born with superior abilities but an education must still be acquired. Shakespeare of Stratford at best received a grammar-school education until age 14. He never went to university, traveled abroad or (so far as we know) visited Elizabeth I’s court, yet his work displays familiarity with a vast range of esoterica. This includes medieval Latin, demotic French, botany, the law, military procedures, the towns and geography of Italy and France, court politics and personalities, aristocratic past-times like falconry and jousting, up-to-date scientific knowledge (e.g., the heliocentric theory of the solar system), psychology, history, literature and medicine. His vocabulary outstrips everyone else’s 3:1.

For these reasons and more, scholars have increasingly proposed that ‘William Shakespeare’ was merely the nom de plume of someone else: the philosopher Francis Bacon, dramatist Christopher Marlowe, English earls Edward de Vere, William Stanley, Fulke Greville, Roger Manners and King James I. Women too have been suggested: Mary Sidney, Emilia Bassano Lanier, even Queen Elizabeth herself. Of course there are those—the majority—who still maintain that the lad from Stratford took himself to London around 1588 and there blossomed.

The debate rages on and has become the hottest and most exciting topic in Shakespeare studies today. Attributions scholars argue about what kinds of evidence may be used to identify authorial style—poetic quality, dramatic technique, computer-based analysis, contemporary documents and more. Some of the world’s most talented thinkers and writers (Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, etc.) have toyed with the possibility that the traditional ‘Shakespeare’ is a fraud and that, with additional research, the truth will set the Collected Works free.